 Good afternoon, everyone, or morning or evening, wherever you may be. My name is Gregory Bowman, and I have the honor and the privilege of serving as the dean at Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island. And on behalf of my law school and our co-sponsors for today's event, City University of New York School of Law and Juris, I want to welcome you to today's Integrating Doctrine and Diversity Speaker Series event on Making Changes and Making Mistakes. The inspiration for the series is the excellent book that is co-edited by various folks, including my colleague Nicole, who will speak momentarily. And it draws from the expertise of faculty across the country about how to integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion into the law school curriculum. It's been very well received, and we've had a great series of speakers events so far this year, and I look forward to today's event as well. So the question that's driving today's event is, what should you do when you make a mistake in the classroom that is offensive, and we all make mistakes, and it is an important part of the conversation on diversity, equity, and inclusion. So thank you for being here. I'm really excited to hear from our speakers. Thank you to our speakers in advance for what they're going to talk about and the wisdom they are going to impart. And I will turn things over to my colleague, Anna Baraza, who is the School of Laws Interim Director of Diversity and Outreach at Roger Williams University. So Anna, you have the virtual podium. Thanks again. Thank you, Dean Bowman. Before we begin, I want to take a moment to reflect on the lands which we reside. We are coming from many places, physically and remotely, and we want to acknowledge the ancestral homelands and traditional territories of indigenous and native peoples who have been here since time immemorial, and to recognize that we must continue to build our solidarity and kinship with native peoples across the Americas and across the globe. Roger Williams University School of Law is located here in Bristol, Rhode Island. And so we acknowledge and honor the Narragansett and Poconecate people and psalms, the original name of the land that our campus resides on. We also acknowledge that this country would not exist if it wasn't for the free enslaved labor of Black people. And we recognize that the town of Bristol and the very land our campus resides on have benefited significantly from the trade of enslaved people from Africa, the economy of New England, Rhode Island, and more specifically, Bristol was built from wealth generated through the triangle trade of human lives. During this time of national reckoning with our history of slavery and the disparate treatment of Black people, we honor the legacy of the African diaspora and the Black lives, knowledge, and skills stolen due to violence and white supremacy. While the movement for justice and liberation is building and we are witnessing the power of the people, many are still being met with violence and even being killed. As upholders of justice, our hope is to become agents of change for members of our society who have been met with violence, physical, mental, emotional, through our privilege. And as upholders of justice, we believe that our students who soon will be practitioners of law can be and already are agents of change as well. And for those who are not familiar with this practice, why do we do a land and labor acknowledgement? I want to share with you a statement from Northwestern University's Native American and Indigenous initiatives, which explains it much better than I could. It is important to understand the long standing history that has brought you to reside on the land and to seek to understand your place within that history. Land acknowledgements and labor acknowledgements do not exist in a past tense or historical context. Colonialism is a current ongoing process and we need to build our mindfulness of our present participation in it. I turn it now over to my colleague, Nicole. Hi. Thank you, Anna and Dean Bowman. Thank you all for attending our event today. The fourth in the Integrating Doctorate and Diversity Speaker Series. Today, like Dean Bowman said, we'll be discussing what to do or sometimes what not to do when we make mistakes in classroom discussions involving race, gender, identity, ability, religion or ethnicity. My name is Nicole. I'm the moderator for today. If you have any questions, please chat them in. I'll try to work them into our discussion and I'm going to start by introducing today's speakers. Tiffany Graham is an Associate Professor of Law and the Associate Dean of Diversity and Inclusion at Turrell College, the Jacob Fuchsburg Law Center. Dean Graham primarily teaches in the areas of constitutional law and race and law, but has also taught CIRM Pro, Law and Sexuality, and torts. She's written and spoken nationally on topics broadly related to LBGTQ plus equality, including marriage equality, LGBTQ plus youth homelessness, conversion therapy and the integration of LGBTQ plus communities and rural spaces. Dylan Malagrino is a tenured full professor of law from the Charleston School of Law. Presently he's a visiting professor of law of property, will trust in estates and land use at Southwestern Law School in 2021-2022. Amanda Reese is a 3L student at Roger Williams University School of Law where she is a member of the honors program and serves as the executive notes and comments editor on the Roger Williams University Law Review. So today's focus is about when professors make mistakes. It is difficult to even have this conversation. And so I want to start by thanking the speakers who are being brave enough to talk about making mistakes and sort of owning that. The more we seek to change up our methods to make them more inclusive and the more work we do to integrate our curriculum, the more opportunities there are for making mistakes. These mistakes may hold us back from doing the work of change in the first place. So Tiffany, this question is to you. Today's discussion about making mistakes, I imagine within the scope of teaching common law or any topic really, but specifically common law, the materials present many places where a professor can make mistakes. In your chapter of the book, you write, based on my own teaching experiences, students generally respond well to the inclusion of a reproductive justice focused subunit when studying abortion. They rarely have the opportunity to think about abortion within the context of healthcare, more broadly, race, poverty, and the intersections that link these issues. To be clear, I have also had students with strong moral objections to abortion and who resist anything that they interpret as an attempt to persuade them to alter their views. This feels like really fraught to me. And it feels like there could be potential for professors to make mistakes. Can you talk a little bit about how you handle students who might be resistant to the material or your approach? Sure. So I will say that the first time that I became aware that I had stepped in it was my first time through. I was teaching at a Catholic law school, and I thought that I had handled abortion fairly neutrally. And it's quite possible that I handled it mostly neutrally. And the students may have assumed that I had a liberal perspective and full transparency. I do. But to be completely fair to them, when I read my evaluations and saw that more than one student said that my liberal view came out and they didn't think it was appropriate for a Catholic school, I took a couple of lessons from that. One, I began to really listen to myself even more than I already had been doing. I mean, while I was at the Catholic school, I knew I had to be very careful about that because of the sensitivities in the room. But even when I left and went to other places, Catholic schools are not the only ones where students are going to be potentially quite sensitive about the issue of abortion. And so I continued to listen to myself. But I also paid close attention to what I was teaching. There is a case, Gonzales versus Carhartt that I teach. And it is a fairly, frankly, gruesome case in some ways when you get into the facts because the facts are an important aspect of, I mean, the facts around the particular procedure that is used is an important aspect of the decision. And I don't ask my students to recite those facts. I do it myself in order to protect them from having to do that. I also try very self-consciously to incorporate references to both sides of the debate. One of the things that I tried this year was showing my students the film, Jackson. It's a documentary about the last abortion clinic that is in Jackson, Mississippi. And the film highlights people on both sides of the debate. And I did that on purpose so that people would feel like their views were, that all the views were being heard. So I feel like these are some of the things that I have done, not just to respect my students' perspectives, but also to insulate myself from the criticism that I'm not listening or being respectful or honoring the fact that even if you can tell where I'm coming from, that people disagree with me. Thanks. I think that that's like a really helpful strategy when thinking about it and framing it is to really intentionally include as many sides as you can. It sounds like some of the discussions can be super uncomfortable, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But I guess my question is, how do you know when a discussion is too uncomfortable? Sometimes we as professors are met with like this eerie silence and the mistakes we make may be less obvious than we hope. How do you know if you've mistakenly crossed the line in class? Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you don't know until the evaluations come back and that's when you hear it. Sometimes you don't know until the call comes from the dean of students or the dean of academic affairs. I will say that. Listen to your gut. I think that a lot of times there's especially when you're new, you might be a little paranoid, but especially once you have experience, you start to get better at hearing the silences that are just the students don't know the answer. The students are uninterested in the conversation. The students are uncomfortable and the students are mad. One of the things that is helpful about being face to face again is it's hard to read faces in Zoom school. But when you are face to face again, you can swivel your head around the room and say, oh, I'm losing you. That actually happened to me yesterday. I was teaching Baki. And when you start teaching affirmative action, especially as an African-American woman in a room full of white students, you have to identify where the minefields might be, especially because you recognize that there are minefields for them too. They're afraid to talk to you. And in navigating that space, it is easy for them to go too far, but it's easy for me to go too far. And I had a very uncomfortable conversation yesterday. I think that I got it right, though. But I did check in with them afterwards to ask them, one, did I go too far? It doesn't mean they told me the truth, but I did ask. And I feel that they sometimes appreciate just being asked if they went too far. But two, sometimes the truth is you honestly just don't know until the end of the semester. And if that's when you find out, you just fix it for the next year. Thanks. The discussion of minefields is a good transition to my question for Dylan. In your essay in the book, you write, when integrating that hill case into the classroom, I'm sensitive to the possibility students themselves or their loved ones might be among the community targeted. I remind the class always to be respectful. Recently, I've realized over the years, students have become more surprised that there would be negative treatment of persons living with AIDS. Some of the class discussion highlights the relevance of this case today. The common interest communities still seek to keep out others with actions cloaked in enforcing restrictive governance. Whether these others are residents of a home for victims of domestic violence or a sober home for residents receiving treatment to stay clean and healthy or group homes for people with mental impairment, neighbors will have some negative associations that will require good lawyers to know how to combat such discrimination. Turning to classroom discussions in my experience, discussions about mental health or domestic violence or addiction can be traumatic to some of our students. Can you talk a little bit about how you approach these conversations? Have you made a mistake when discussing some of these sensitive issues? Thanks, Nicole. Great. I appreciate you pointing out that part of my essay. I think as professors, we want to make sure that we're reaching as many students as we possibly can and when you bring up sensitive issues where they might have a personal connection to a path towards being healthy or relatives who are struggling, it can be a trigger. And so I don't think we should shy away from these kinds of difficult discussions. I think good lawyers are needed to help people through those difficult times. Of course, as Tiffany said, we should try to be respectful. And the way that I try to be respectful is to preface any of those discussions with kind of providing parameters as to what we're learning about and where we need to kind of focus our attention so that we don't go off the rails and talk about people's personal passions with respect to certain sensitive topics. I think prefacing the discussion also by saying, although it's sensitive, it's important that we talk about it. And when you acknowledge that importance, you're kind of validating the passions that your students have. And you can kind of, as the professor, steer the discussion around those students who are vocal and want to contribute to the discussion and those who are maybe sheepish because they don't want to talk about something that's really uncomfortable for them. I try to use words that are fairly sterile and I hesitate to say passionless just to make sure that I can kind of keep control of the discussion and not go down a path that would alienate some of the students from being able to learn. I think we all make mistakes and I think that that's inevitable. I think what I've learned over time is to try to remind students that their passions are maybe what's going to steer their career. But that what the goal for today's lesson is to learn about these topics and how best that we can understand and analyze the matter or the law. And, you know, try not to take it so personally and instead remember that this is a profession of service and that there might be memos you have to write or clients you have to interview where it would be personally quite difficult for you to be thinking about these things. But, you know, it's those moments where they need a lawyer to help them through. And that's why you that's why you're here in law school. So I try to focus on that. As far as mistakes I've made, thank you for asking. I think we've all made mistakes, even if we don't know it. I think also Tiffany mentioned this as well, is that, you know, when you make comments in class, they're not only being delivered by you, they're being received by an entire audience of students. And so there might be students who receive the information in ways that are not necessarily how you intended it, but it really is offensive or they took it negatively. And so being open to the idea that we make mistakes all the time and we just might not know about it is really humbling, but it's probably the best way to approach these sensitive topics. Certainly in constitutional law, as Tiffany mentioned, you know, abortion comes up in criminal classes, rape will come up. Discrimination comes up in several doctrines and people might have felt victimized by discrimination. And so, you know, understanding that there's no intent behind trying to make a negative comment is going to help the students maybe be more receptive to the things that you're going to say. Yeah, those are the things that come to mind. Sure, thanks. So I guess I directly want to ask Dylan and Tiffany, what advice do you have for law professors when they make a mistake? Here is the thing that everyone's shown up for, like the mistake happens, what do you do? If you know you've made it, own it. I mean, that's really the only thing that you can do. It's part of what it means to be a professional. It's part of what it means to respect your students. You just acknowledge that you made the mistake. You apologize for having made the mistake. And then you work really hard not to make the mistake again. I have found that students more often than not, more often than not, will forgive you if you atone. And by atone, I don't just mean apologize. I mean, apologize and fix it. They are less forgiving if you dig in or if you give the impression that you are not willing to fix the problem for the future. I agree. I think taking ownership for the things that you have said in the moment when you realize that you've made an unintentional mistake. I think it's important. It's a great way to show the students that you're human. They'll probably mostly be understanding of you. I think that students are more understanding if you've worked hard to build and cultivate a personal relationship with your students and so that they feel invested in your success because you're helping them succeed. And so having that kind of humility to be able to accept that you maybe have misspoken in class and if it's truly unintentional, then I think it's an opportunity for everyone to learn. When you make a mistake, you don't just shut down and retreat. You instead try to use it as a moment to educate yourself, maybe educate others who didn't realize that what you might have said was a mistake as well in the class and take it as an opportunity. And so, yeah, I hear myself echoing the things Tiffany said, but I think that they're spot on. Yeah, I think Dylan's absolutely right when he hones in on the word opportunity. None of us is perfect. And as long as we are in this career, we're going to continue to learn or at least ideally will continue to learn. And so if we take our if we use our mistakes as an opportunity, it's just a way for us to get better. I I said this in another one of these events about addressing when a discussion goes out of control. But I think it makes sense in the context of professors making mistakes, too. My approach is that you don't just have the one opportunity when it happens to set it straight or to apologize. You have this ongoing relationship with the students. And as Dylan said, there's work that happened before the mistake was made. And then there's the mistake. And in the moment, you might just be so one, you might not have realized it. But two, you might be overwhelmed by it. You might be ashamed. You might be embarrassed. It might be all you can think about. But you couldn't address it beyond just when it happens. You can send out an email if you feel like you could be more genuine over email. You could address it in a future class. You could, like Tiffany said, discuss it with the students after or in office hours. You know, did I go too far? How like let's do a check in. You don't have to deal with the mistake in the same instant that you made it. We're human. We have feelings. We're complex. We might not be well positioned in that moment to address the mistake. And so like it might be better in writing or after a conversation with our family or with the person in the office next door, that's OK. I'm teaching is about the relationship and the trust. And so don't feel like I messed it up. And now there needs to be this apology. No, like the process of atonement can can go on over time and you don't lose the opportunity. I'm going to move on to a question for Amanda. Thank you for being here today, Amanda. I realize that this is terrifying that you are a student and you are afraid to be honest and say the wrong thing. But I asked you to speak today because you're amazing. And I know that no matter what you say, it will be the right thing. We want to hear from student perspective. Based on your experiences in the classroom, what has been an an effective or an ineffective way for professors to rebound from a mistake? Thank you, Nicole. My response to this, I guess, will echo a lot of what Tiffany and Dylan have already said, which is that mistakes happen, right? They're in some ways, I think, inevitable. I don't I'm I'm a second semester three. I don't think I've had a semester where a professor hasn't made a mistake. But I also don't think I have ever seen it dealt with effectively. And by effectively, I mean they addressed it and then didn't repeat it. As Tiffany said, like they work to fix it. And I know you mentioned email. And I do agree that situations don't always have to be addressed contemporaneously, but I do find that sort of trying to write the wrong via email is a bit dismissive. And I think I think that way, because if you don't take the opportunity to confront your students about it, you miss the opportunity to sort of, I think, create a forum where you can discuss why the thing that was done or said was offensive, why your students perceived it that way. I think another reason I haven't seen mistakes dealt with effectively is, again, what Tiffany and Dylan have said. I think a lot of times, professors don't know that they've made a mistake. Most of the time, I think, I hope things that are offensive were not intentional and law school is such an insular place where I think people that spend a long time in academia aren't particularly attuned to evolving cultural attitudes and language. And so professors are kind of insulated and don't know when they've crossed the line. And I think it's hard for students to bring that to their attention. And I think a lot of the times the onus falls on minority students, because usually those are the people who have been offended. And before you do bring it to a professor's attention, you have to weigh like, what if this has an impact on my grade? I probably can't ask this individual for a letter of recommendation moving forward. A professor probably won't give a TA ship to someone who they feel they have to walk on eggshells around. So yeah, I think there's a lot of reasons that there isn't an effective response and we just kind of move past it. So I'm sorry, I don't have a more helpful answer there. But what has definitely not has what has definitely not been effective is any form of deflection. I remember once I had a professor who said a student's name incorrectly and their response to being corrected was to say that the student had such an unusual name and for context, that student was not even the only person in that class with that name. There was a second student with that name. So I think like deflecting the mistake is is never the right way to go. Denial is also not effective. I think it's a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to just say like, I'm not racist. I'm not sexist. I'm not homophobic. It just came across the wrong way. But I think that if your student perceives something that you said is offensive, that's not an invitation to debate whether or not it was. It kind of is something that you just have to take it face value and try to learn to be better, ask why, why they perceived it as offensive, how you can be better. Thanks, Amanda. I was actually having a conversation with Amanda and some of the students who worked at the library today and I asked them, which of your professors actually ask you to come to them when they've made a mistake and the students said, none of my professors do that. And so like one of the strategies I employ is I specifically ask the students, if I make a mistake, I'm going to make a mistake. I try to normalize that I'm a human being and we make mistakes. And in order to learn and grow, I've got to get better. And in order for me to get better and to be more effective, sometimes I need you to tell me when I made a mistake. And it's going to happen. So it's not if it happens, it's when it happens. I need you to tell me. I write that in the syllabus. I reinforce that on the first day of class. I talk about it throughout the class. Hey, I might make mistakes. Come to me. And so I guess I would just encourage everyone out there to consider whether they have asked the students to talk to them when they feel like they make mistakes. And I know that it opens me up to criticism from students. But it also humanizes me and it opens me up to other perspectives. And so I think this is like a pretty straightforward and easy, but powerful technique to help like evolve and gather more information. And maybe as Amanda suggested, like be a little less insulated. Dylan and Tiffany, one of the most common ways in which I hear professors make mistakes is by calling students by the wrong name or by the wrong pronoun. This can take the form of dead naming a transgender student or perhaps calling a student the name of another student in the same class of the same ethnicity or race. Do you have any advice to professors on how to improve with respect to student names? Well, I will say this about gender identity. I have a seating chart, but I also work with my colleagues last semester to put a new policy in place where we were going to be mindful of gender identity. And the way that we were going to do this was to commit to doing a survey at the beginning of the semester where we would, for instance, ask for students pronouns. I had to actually train myself out of saying preferred pronouns because of the idea that it's not a preference, it's just a fact. But also if, but that's only relevant for or it's really mostly relevant for professors who want to address students with honorifics. If professors did not want to do something like that, the recommendation was to go to first names. And that's what I've done. But what helps me is a seating chart. I have a seating chart that I passed around at the beginning of the semester and the students identify themselves. I don't have, for instance, a generated or I have a generated document from the school that lists all my students' names, but I don't rely on it. I let them tell me what their first names are. And so that is what I rely on in so far as making a mistake where you must where you where you mix up two students who were of the same race. Really, all you can do at that point is say you're sorry. Or you can do a say you're sorry. And also everybody it's been my experience at every school where there is, you know, a Facebook of some sort. We all have secretaries and one trick might be to take index cards and have your assistant take the student's photo, put it on an index card with the student's name and then study the index cards so that you can get the student's faces in your head and that way, even if you haven't done that perfectly, if you've made that particular mistake after you've done it, go home, pull those two students index cards and then study those cards intensively so that you really do get, if nothing else, those students faces down so you really don't make that mistake again. I have a couple of things to add. I think Tiffany said a lot of things I wanted to say as well. Thankfully, at the schools, I have been on the faculty. There's always additionally on the roster what the student's preferred name is. And so although that's just their preferred name, at least it's the student letting the admissions office or whomever know that that is what they prefer to be called. And one of the things that I started really early was to try, like Tiffany said, to really work to memorize the student's names and then really try to impress the students in the first week or two. By having known their name already when we had just first met. And so when I call on students in class in those first couple of weeks, I call on them as a question, right? Is it Tiffany so that at least I'm prefacing my calling on Tiffany in the classroom with a little bit of uncertainty because I'm still learning your names and the reason why I do it that way is because I have found that students are more forgiving when you do make mistakes at the beginning of a semester than they would be if it's been an entire semester and you still don't know the students names. So I think all of us could maybe really recognize that it's not necessarily obvious on what we should be calling students and then be comfortable enough to make those mistakes early on in the semester so that students can see that you're trying to get it right and that if you were to make a mistake, they're more likely to be forgiving at the beginning of the semester than at the end. Yeah. So those are some of the things I wanted to add to what Tiffany said. Thanks. And I just want to acknowledge we are getting a lot of questions like far more than we can answer, but I'm going to try to work them in as we go. Amanda, so one of the questions was, can you talk a little bit about some mistakes you've seen, but in particular on this issue of naming or pronouns, can you talk a little bit about your experience in the law school classroom if you have any? Yeah. So I don't I don't think I have any first hand experience with this because I have a fairly American name. None of my professors have struggled with Amanda, but I have seen my peers struggle with this. I again will just echo a lot of what Tiffany and Dylan have said, which is I think when a professor tries to guess a name that that it's never going to end well. If you see a name that you think you're going to struggle with, ask. Ask them first for the pronunciation. And then from that moment on, jot down a phonetic spelling, elicit the help of your TA. This sounds harsh. I don't care how you do it. Get the name right. Whatever sort of sorry, whatever sort of tool you have to employ to help you do that. I mean, I know it's harsh, but I don't know. We're lawyers. We Latin terms roll off the tongue easily. You can learn a student's name. And then I think a separate issue is confusing students like interchanging names, and this happens a lot with students of color. I've seen this happen more than I thought I would having gone to law school in the years twenty nineteen to twenty twenty two. I have seen this happen more times than I can count. Don't don't confuse students of color's names. It's such an egregious mistake. As Tiffany said, like get their pictures, study them, whatever you have to do. Really, it's it's not a great mistake to make. Yeah. All right, we'll follow up with that and say that when I in a prior position that I held, I was responsible for reading students names at graduation. Names are a sore spot for me. When I say that, what I mean is I view saying students names incorrectly as deeply disrespectful because it's their name that their parents gave them that. And I hate it when I make a mistake. And so when we went through graduation practice, I did exactly what Amanda said. If I encountered a name that I didn't know how to say properly, I would literally just ask and then I would write it out phonetically. So that is that that advice spot on exactly what I do. All right, I have a follow up question to you, Tiffany. Sort of in your role as associate dean for diversity and inclusion. Sometimes when an issue arises in classrooms, students approach administration to intercede. I was wondering how you counsel professors to respond or react when this happens. And we got a question chatted in from do you have advice for the administration in this instance? So I don't have advice from my current position in a previous life. I was the academic team and I had issues come up in that setting more so than I have had in this setting. I've only been the associate dean for diversity for going on a year now. And the way that I would handle it, if a student came to me with a complaint, I would go to the professor and I would talk about it and I would say, OK, a student came to me and expressed this concern. Can you talk to me from your perspective about what happened in the classroom? And from there, what I would try to do is I would really try to broker some kind of a piece because regardless of whether or not I thought one was right or the other was right. Well, if the if the if the professor had done something egregiously wrong, depending on the level of the wrong, it's I think you have to point it out. You have to say, OK, this was deeply problematic and we need to talk about why. I never had an experience quite like that. The experiences that I had were more in the gray area of misunderstanding more than anything else. And in the course of having just an honest conversation about a misunderstanding where we ended up getting to was a place where the professor felt like he or she could go back into the classroom and try to address what happened and move forward productively. Now, I'm not going to necessarily say that that happened in a perfect way in every single instance, but that was certainly my approach to just talk to the professor and say, this is something that came to me. How can we try to make sure that your student is comfortable on a forward going basis? Was that advice for both the professor and from for the administration? Yes. Yes. I mean, I was I was speaking from the administrators with with my administrator hat on, but if you want to but but but but I suppose yes, it is advice for both. If if you're the professor, you don't necessarily know that you did it. So when the if the administration comes to you, I mean, I think this goes back to some of what was said earlier. A lot of this is putting putting self aside and regardless of what you intended, what you said or what you did was received in a particular way. And at the end of the day, our job is to make sure that students learn. And if there is something that happened in the classroom that is undermining our students ability to learn from us, then it's our job as professionals to take reasonable steps to try to address that flaw. Now, I realize that that has implications for things like academic freedom and whatnot. And so I don't want to speak too broadly, but I think as a default position, that's an appropriate position to take. I loved what you just said about self because it is so hard. This is my career. This is part of my identity. I want to get it right at the same time when someone is offended by something that I didn't intend to I didn't intend. It is my knee jerk reaction to say, oh, but I didn't mean it. Or a more toxic, I think, version is, oh, but maybe you misunderstood me. Or maybe if I had said it differently, it wouldn't be offensive. Or maybe this was offensive, but not this. And it's it's a lot harder to breathe. And it is a lot harder to own it. And it is also a lot harder to I think about where the lens is. And so if I then put the lens on me and my mistake and how I feel about it, I'm redirecting the lens back to whiteness in a situation where that might be the worst possible course of action. And quickly, from my perspective, obviously, I'm not redirecting my lens back to whiteness, but I am redirecting redirecting it back to power because in the classroom, I hold the power. Absolutely. So I there was this blog post. So one of the things that I really find helpful is having a supportive community. So when I make a mistake on Friday mornings, we have a group of people here, faculty, staff who meet and discuss issues about teaching. And so I know I but no matter what happens during the week on Friday morning, I can come and talk about it with people who will share their opinions, even if they don't agree or if they agree. And so having a supportive community is one of the things I recommend for everybody. But a couple of weeks ago, we were discussing this issue and there was this blog post I found called White Teachers, How to Handle Being Called Racist. The author is a teacher who says, I talk about race a lot in my classroom and it's hard to talk about race, especially as a white guy and not mess it up. It's been the things I've said or not said. It's been who I called on or didn't. Sometimes just being a white teacher is enough. Just existing in a place so rooted in whiteness and so underserving of communities of color means that a student will call you a racist for standing there doing nothing. Then again, we probably should be called racist if we're just standing there doing nothing. So you may get called racist. Get over it. Being called racist is not the worst thing that can happen to anyone. Being the constant victim of systemic and personal racism is way, way worse than being called racist, so get over it. If you make a mistake in the classroom and your students call you racist or sexist or homophobic or ableist or anti immigrant and this question is for anybody, are there productive ways to respond? Maybe I'll start with this one. Thanks again, Nicole. I think I want to start by first saying we do have to we do have to accept that we're teaching the students that we have and not some, you know, class of students that we wish we had. And so I do think that the students, you know, are telling us a lot about ourselves when they react to the things that we do or don't do or say, just like the blogger mentioned in what you cited. And so I think we should meet our students to where they are, right? If our goal is to try to reach them, then when they react in a way that was not the intended reaction, they call us racist or sexist. Then I if it's truly unintentional, I want to know why that the students thought that that was racist or sexist so I can learn what I did or said that had that reaction and probably try not to have that happen again if it's going to alienate a student and prevent him or her from learning. And so that's one of the things that I wanted to say when I was listening to you just now was that, yes, that will inevitably happen. And yes, there might be some misunderstanding or confusion as to why a student reacts that way, but instead of focusing on the misunderstanding or confusion, accept that you have to reach the students you have in front of you. And if that requires you to learn more, then as humbling as that might sound, then you need to learn more. And if it was truly unintentional to have that reaction from your student, then use it as like we've said earlier today, an opportunity to educate. Tiffany, did you want to add to that at all? Don't. And the reason I don't is because I feel like this is a this is a question that's really very much about how well white people receive this kind of critique and I don't think it's appropriate for me to speak for you. Thanks. I have an anonymous question that I can ask to Tiffany or Dylan, so whoever wants to jump in, I teach a class where there are a lot of terms used in cases and otherwise where there are genuine genuine disagreements on which terms are preferred and the example given is disability law. This can be particularly fraught because the casebook will have non-preferred terms and students will genuinely think they're using the right terms. I've even had some students correct me on a term when I understand a different version to be preferred. Do you have advice for a situation like that? Please, Tiffany. I will say that in common law, where that comes up for me is with negro and colored. And I have white students who genuinely don't understand that those two words are anachronistic now. And the way that it comes out is they will have read it in a case and then in normal conversation later, I will hear them use the words again. And that's when I have to stop them and help them understand that no, these terms are anachronistic, it's appropriate for you to say black or African-American at this point in time. And so the way that I handle that is to make it clear because I've also had black students in particular come to me and say that they don't like, say the word negro. In fact, they have used they've described the word negro as the N word. And my conversation in that case was to say my perspective on that was that I did not think that negro and the N word were the same thing. But we have different points of view and I respect that. And so what I told them is as a professional and in the classroom, I would use case language when it was appropriate to use case language. But outside the classroom, I don't use those words. Having said that, the only place where I draw the line is in fact slurs. I don't use the N word. I don't use the F word. I don't use the C word. I don't use those slurs because regardless of the debate that occasionally rages among law professors about using words in context so students learn. Students aren't stupid. They can read the word in front of them. They know what word is being used. They know what word is being meant. You can use any religion and everybody understands exactly what is being said. They understand the legal principle that is at stake. You can discuss it without making people feel like their skin is on fire. That's hard to follow. But I also want to acknowledge that it comes up in other contexts as well. I think your question highlighted the fact that the Fair Housing Act uses the word handicapped, whereas the Americans with Disabilities Act uses the word disabled. And we've even reached a certain point where we try to be even more sensitive when it comes to those who fall within the purview of those statutes in property law. We also typically use a case somewhere along the lines that addresses the interplay between Native Americans and the federal government. And many of those cases refer to Indians. And so I only mentioned those few examples because as professors, we know they're coming up and what we can do is to provide that context, provide the parameters of what words would be appropriate before we actually engage in the discussion. And so I have to agree with Tiffany that you have to draw the line when it comes to something that would be a slur, you would be understanding if you're using language that is in the opinion, but you want to educate the students to their analysis in today's world would have to use the appropriate words and want to make sure that that's what that's what you focus on in dealing with these sensitive topics. Thank you. I think that that's a great theme to highlight. These things don't happen in a vacuum that there's work to be done in the syllabus. There's work to be done from the beginning up until the class where a mistake or incident happens and then after that. And so I think like there's a hyper focus on the mistake and maybe not the rest of the relationship. We have an attendee question which anyone can jump in on. How does cancel culture come into play after a mistake? Even if someone is contrite, it seems a lot of backlash is in the nature of how could someone not have known too little too late or they're not sorry about this. They're just sorry they got caught. Does anyone have a response to that? I guess I can start. I think I saw that come into the chat and I've been thinking about it for a few minutes. I go back to something I said a little earlier today about we have to teach the students who are in front of us. And I think that the students today have a platform, right? They all have individual websites on the internet for their social media accounts. And so they have a wide area that they can cover if they wanted to disparage someone. And maybe the person who spoke is deserving of it, but maybe it's not. Maybe it's unintentional and more worthy of an educational moment. So my response would be that, like Nicole just mentioned, what we do here is built on relationships of trust. And so if as professors, right from the start of every semester, we try to build those personal relationships with our students, we try to make them feel like every class session is a one on one tutorial, but it just happens to be in this group setting, maybe if if we were perhaps more open with our own vulnerabilities when we come to class, they can they can kind of root for us as the professor trying to do a good job teaching them. And maybe the students would be more understanding when these mistakes come up and they wouldn't resort to what would be a canceled culture. But those are the students we have. And so maybe we have to do more in the lead up to these conversations where there's maybe a higher risk of making a mistake so that we can avoid what would be the ramifications justly or unjustly. So I've actually thought like, sorry, Tiffany, do you want to go? No, go ahead. I've thought so much about this. I teach a class on race, right? And there are so many students and I think so many white students who are afraid to talk and say the wrong thing because of canceled culture, because they're going to be canceled by their classmates because of social media, whatever. And as a professor, like I get it, like I don't want to be canceled either. I don't want the wrath of the internet. I don't want the wrath of anyone. But it to me feels really inauthentic for me to be worried about making mistakes and to not do the work because someone might cancel me if and when I make a mistake. And so because I'm always convincing other people to talk about race, I have to be brave and like I have this privilege and I have this choice and I choose it and I just embrace it that like I'm going to make mistakes and I treat myself with tremendous grace when I do and I try to understand the context of the society we're in. I speak about canceled culture with the students. I use myself as an example because I'm putting myself out there and they should too. And so I get that there is a concern. I get we care about our reputation as attorneys and as humans. But the whole point of like how difficult some of these conversations are about gender, about identity, about race, about religion is because we don't exercise the muscles of these conversations enough in the law school classroom. And so we need to exercise the muscle more. We need to make more mistakes. There needs to be less to cancel us for because we're all in this together trying harder. And I know that that's a bit patliana and it's also a bit dismissive of the question I don't mean to be. I have given this so much thought. But my answer is like I'm just going to lead and I'm going to do it bravely and cancel culture be damned. Although, you know, hopefully it doesn't happen. Yeah, I mean, I want to pick up on something Dylan said in talking about trust. I mean, you're both talking about being brave, but also this idea of trust is an important one, because if you've established the relationship of trust, then there is a greater likelihood that the students will respond to you without the instinct to try to silence or try to punish you. But even if that does happen and even if you're not the one to whom it's happening, it's happening to someone with whom they don't have the same relationship of trust. And you are in a position to try to say negotiate between the two sides. I think that an important part of doing that is honoring the fact that the students' perspectives are worthy of respect. It's important to ensure that you respect their right to speak up. But I also think that depending on the nature of the mistake that modeling empathy is an important thing too, because. I'll be I mean, I'll be honest. I think that sometimes, especially in a world where social media amplifies mistakes and amplifies agreement and outrage. One of the things that can sometimes get lost is the the opportunity to forgive. Now, again, I don't want to be dismissive because some people, you know, let them go. It's fine to just let them go. But I don't know that it's always the case that we get the judgment call right. And so I think that if we are able as leaders in our institutions to be smart about walking that line between respecting this respecting student responses, but also being empathetic when it's called for that we can do a better job, perhaps of getting the answer right. All right. Well, we have a minute or two left. Dylan, Tiffany or Amanda, do you have any final thoughts on this topic you want to share? Thank you. This was a great conversation. I just wish we had more time to talk to the folks in the chat. Me too. And don't be surprised if I call you, I call you back up to continue part two. I just want to say thank you as well. I I've enjoyed the panels in the past. Some of the speakers, I've really hung on there every word. And so you've really put together some really great groups. If I did have one final thought, I would just want to encourage us to maybe bring up issues of diversity right from the start, no matter the course that you teach, it's not just for the employment discrimination course. It should be for all of the courses because I imagine there's diversity in every doctrine. And so if we start those conversations right from the beginning, it actually kind of lets the entire class to the idea that there's going to be some some topics that are maybe sensitive that we are, you know, learning to to talk as professionals about. Yeah, I think that that really underlines the point of the book. It was integrating doctrine and diversity. It's not here's a race class. Here's a gender class. It's this needs to be taught in every class and like sort of brought into the entire curriculum and the more we do it, the better we're going to get at it. I'm thank you, Tiffany and Dylan and Amanda. Thank you all the attendees. Thank you to Anna and Dean Bowman. Thank you to the events and planning teams at Roger Williams and CUNY and Jurist, especially Jane and Chelsea. They are the magic that happens behind these events that you don't see. Our next event will be on the afternoon of the 26th of April and we'll be tackling reconsidering and auditing our syllabus and classroom practices. Thank you so much, everyone.